Delicious thugs

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As a sad outcome of the recent housing bubble, there are a couple of empty, unfinished houses in my neighborhood, waiting for the good times (and builders) to return in some distant future. I find it fascinating to see how fast the lush, abundant nature of the Pacific Northwest has claimed the land back, and filled it with such a rampant tangle of blackberries that they make the roses covering Sleeping Beauty's castle seem lethargic.

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In my innocence, I thought that these vigorous plants were native - they surely look like they are having a ball here - until I found them on the list of noxious weeds in this state. Only the tiny, trailing dewberry, Rubus ursinus, is native to the Pacific Northwest. The thugs in my pictures are Himalayan blackberries, one of the two non-native species of blackberries that were introduced here by two unsuspecting Europeans, eager to find new berry varieties to grow in the fertile soil of the Northwest.

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Dr. Laurea was the first to try his luck with blackberries, and imported the evergreen blackberry, R. laciniatus, from Hawaii some time in the 1850s. Some thirty years later, horticulturalist Luther Burbank acquired a package of seeds of the Himalayan blackberry, R. procerus, from an seed exchange in India. The seeds proved to be more than the success Burbank had hoped on. Proud of his novelty, Burbank wrote in his catalogue that "the Himalayas would produce buckets of berries on wines that could grow 100-200 feet in only one season." Obviously, he didn't think this would be any kind of a risk, and definitely did not foresee having just introduced one of the area's most notorious weeds ever, capable of covering countless acres of land with impenetrable, thorny thickets.

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I guess that in the horticultural hall of fame, these guys score only a bit above the Englishman who imported rabbits to Australia, even if it has said in their defence that those days nobody quite knew about the huge risks of importing new species to new continents. And at least they were trying to grow something edible, instead of just wanting to introduce the ancient sport of fox hunting to their newly established society...

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Anyway, being an eager scavenger of all things edible, I'm already looking forward to the blackberry season ahead. It seems to become a good one: the wines are full of flowers and tiny, green berry babies. Almost no-one bothers to pick them in my neighborhood, which means that all the more are left to me and a couple of old ladies of Asian heritage, all of us probably the only ones eccentric (or greedy?) enough to do this. In two months time, we'll all be standing amongst the thorny wines again, picking the sweet, juicy berries with our sticky fingertips stained dark purple.
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